As well as Gaston Bachelard who is a material philosopher who worked with the poetic imagination. This is an imagination that he divided into two aspects, material and dynamic. The material is tied to the elements of air, fire, water, metal, earth. The dynamic is within that materiality’s inner life. Poetic correspondences “find in the very depth of materials all of the symbols of the inner life.” Our pleasure is in finding ourselves ulterior to ‘other’ in material imaginings.

Archetypes of these feelings of ulteriority exist in forms such as the shell, womb, house, snake and labyrinth.

The Queen Conch (Strombus Gigas) is a marine animal I worked with for 4 months as a mariculture researcher and underwater photographer a while back in the Turks and Caicos Islands for P.R.I.D.E. (Protection of Reefs and Islands from Degradation and Exploitation.) Just as an aside, I brought in the 2 conchs who were the first two to mate in captivity anywhere in the world, and have the pictures somewhere in the recesses of my files.